Will Self says Orwell was a talented mediocrity.
The curious thing is that while during the post-war period we’ve had many political leaders, we’ve got by with just a single Supreme Mediocrity – George Orwell.
I don’t doubt characterising Orwell as a talented mediocrity will put noses out of joint. Not Orwell, surely! Orwell the tireless campaigner for social justice and economic equality; Orwell the prophetic voice, crying out in the wartime wilderness against the dangers of totalitarianism and the rise of the surveillance state; Orwell, who nobly took up arms in the cause of Spanish democracy, then, equally nobly, exposed the cause’s subversion by Soviet realpolitik; Orwell, who lived in saintly penury and preached the solid virtues of homespun Englishness; Orwell, who died prematurely, his last gift to the people he so admired being a list of suspected Soviet agents he sent to MI5.
Orwell who wrote decent, readable, but far from brilliant prose. Yes, that Orwell.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Orwell’s writing as much as the next talented mediocrity. I’ve read the great bulk of his output – at least that which originally appeared in hard covers, and some of his books I’ve read many times over – in particular The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, the long pieces of quasi-reportage that made his name in the 1930s.
Same here, but I have also realized that his writing is not as good as I used to think it.
As for the essays, they can be returned to again and again, if not for their substance alone, certainly for their unadorned Anglo-Saxon style.
It’s this prose style that has made Orwell the Supreme Mediocrity – and like all long-lasting leaders, he has an ideology to justify his rule. Orwell’s essay, Politics and the English Language, is frequently cited as a manifesto of plainspoken common sense – a principled assault upon all the jargon, obfuscation, and pretentiously Frenchified folderol that deforms our noble tongue. Orwell – it’s said by these disciples – established once and for all in this essay that anything worth saying in English can be set down with perfect clarity such that it’s comprehensible to all averagely intelligent English readers.
And that’s bullshit. It’s not true. Much of what he says in “Politics and the English Language” is not true, and is anti-intellectual and anti-a good many other things that matter.
The Beeb helpfully provides Orwell’s List O’Rules, so that we can see how wrong some of them are.
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Two, three and five in particular are terrible “rules” – and he didn’t even obey them himself. (Never use a long word where a short one will do? You’ve got to be kidding. A short one will always “do”; but good writers want words that more than just “do”.)
Those are ok rules for a newspaper that wants the largest possible audience and thus wants to be very careful that might be over the heads of some of the potential audience, but for anyone else, they’re instructions on how to be dull.
I said some of this back in 2005 on the ur-B&W.
I’ve been reading a little Orwell lately – prompted partly by my offhand comment in an email to Norm that Orwell was good but Hitchens is better – which itself was prompted by Philip Dodd’s introduction of Hitchens on ‘Night Waves’ in which he quoted someone (someone unnamed, I think) as writing in a review that Hitchens is as good as Orwell, or almost as good as Orwell, or some such. That annoyed me. It is my considered opinion – despite the offhandedness of the comment alluded to above – that Orwell is over-rated as a writer. Really quite seriously over-rated. That his language is very often decidedly tired and uninspired, even banal, and that there is a lot of commonplace thought in it. Phrases like ‘dirty little scoundrel’ come to mind.
But when Harry at Crooked Timber did a post about Fascinating Hitchens in which he quoted Norm quoting me there was a lot of disagreement (along with some agreement) with my relative estimation of the two – which is why I got Orwell off the shelf to check my impression again. And – I still agree with myself. He’s good, he’s interesting, he’s definitely worth reading, but he is not a great writer or stylist or thinker. He’s not as good as Dwight Macdonald, for instance.
That’s just a flat assertion, obviously. It would take extensive quotation to make my case – because he is good, so I can’t just quote a terrible sentence and leave it at that. But if you read a good chunk of him, the flatness and uninspiredness become increasingly noticeable.
I don’t like flatness in writing. “Politics and the English Language” gets way too close to telling people to write flatly.
I always thought Huxley presented a more authentic version of distopia. The “Anti-Sex League” was always the idea that really took me out of 1984. It was ludicrous as a point of human nature and at odds with population growth as a serious ideological weapon.
1984 is especially uneven. He was dying of TB when he wrote it, in desperate conditions (on an isolated island in the Hebrides with few mod cons and with a little boy to take care of).
I don’t see what’s so preposterous about it. In modern-day America, there’s a fair bit of overlap on the Venn diagram of “people who think and advocate that sex is dirty and shameful” and “people who are scared that ‘other’ countries are outbreeding us.”
Yes, if you take a very abstract view, sex -> pregnancy -> population growth -> more soldiers/workers/peons. But the Anti-Sex League wasn’t anti-reproduction — they just wanted reproduction to happen by artificial insemination, and avoiding any family bonds.
It makes sense to me that, in finding ways to control society, Big Brother would exploit what’s already in the culture. Almost everyone at least thinks about sex, and almost everyone engages in it in some form or another. If you make sex a shameful thing, then virtually the entire population feels guilty and ashamed — and a guilty and ashamed populace is more easily controlled.
I don’t think the Anti-Sex League is at all far fetched.
That sexual Puritanism runs right through Gramsci, for instance; anything that distracts from the needs of the Party is abhorrent.
Self is echoing his hero Nabokov in describing Orwell as a ‘mediocrity’; it’s the word Nabokov uses in his introduction to distance his own dystopia, Bend Sinister, from Orwell’s more famous one.
I don’t see what’s so preposterous about it. In modern-day America, there’s a fair bit of overlap on the Venn diagram of “people who think and advocate that sex is dirty and shameful” and “people who are scared that ‘other’ countries are outbreeding us.”
Yes, there’s the growing chastity movement in the USA as well as the obvious sex-hatred of the Islamic world. Sex is disruptive; it is rooted in the flesh rather than higher ideals.
Sex is a central theme of dystopian fiction; either repression of sex (1984, THX1138, The Handmaids Tale) or an excess of sex (Brave New World, The Year of the Sex Olympics).
I reread Forster’s The Machine Stops recently. Twenty years ago the mechanistic future felt hopelessly dated; now, a society of people never meeting in the flesh but broadcasting their inane thoughts on the latest fads to all and sundry feels prophetic.
I just reread The Machine Stops, too.
Prophetic is a good description.
The Anti-Sex League was a fascinating part of the society of 1984. The members of the League were celibate to show their devotion to Big Brother, like a political order of nuns, and the entire society officially saw sex as only worthwhile as the means of reproduction.
The scientists were said to be working on eliminating the orgasm–presumably both eliminating the female orgasm and making it possible for a male to become erect and ejaculate without feeling pleasure. Interestingly, some theologians have speculated that if it weren’t for the Fall, sex would have been exactly like that.
Suspicion or outright hostility towards eroticism is a major part of the totalitarian mindset, religious or political. One of my favorite writers, Anchee Min, experienced the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution and describes a very similar situation.
Young people’s sexuality was brutally repressed until they entered an approved marriage. A love affair could lead to permanent demotion to a menial job or even prison or death. When she was chosen to act in an important propaganda film as a heroine representing the ideal of the virrtuous, revolutionary “new” woman, she was tested for virginity by doctors. Fortunately, her only experience at that point was with another woman (which would have been the end of them if they’d been caught).
I would recommend her memoirs (Wild Ginger, Red Azalea and The Cooked Seed) and her novels I’ve read so far are Katherine, The Last Empress and Becoming Madame Mao. There are several others. She has a simple yet hauntingly poetic style which actually keeps most of Orwelll`s rules most of the time but without the banality Orwell and other minimalist 20th Century “classic” writers can be guilty of.
I agree Orwell is over-rated, but maybe one of the reasons his legacy can be more irritating than it should be is the appropriation of his language by the right wingers who make him out to be one of them;as if opposing Communist oppression forbids any form of socialism or progressivism.
I always figured that, if I had grown up in the 20s or 30s, I probably would have been a Communist right up until the day I read Animal Farm. Which still does a better job than any other work before or since in showing why it isn’t just that Communism happens not to have worked so far, but why it can’t possibly work.
I don’t think I’d apply “Politics and the English Language” to ALL writing. Much great writing breaks its rules, since rules are meant to be broken. But I’ve certainly read a lot of terrible writing which has made me want to find a copy of Orwell’s essay and hurl it at the author with great force.
In number (v) in the ‘List O’Rules’ Orwell uses at least five ‘foreign’ words.
On the whole, I think 1984 deserves its status as a classic, but I am often baffled by some of the things people like about it. I’ve always thought that the line about a boot stamping on a human face forever was a misstep by Orwell. It’s the kind of line that I’d expect to hear from a comic book villain. If there was a “real” 1984-ish government, its officials wouldn’t think of or describe themselves that way.
I wonder about the context of the time Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language. I can imagine that the prose of today is relatively spare clear compared to some of the florid junk of the decades preceding. On the other hand, if I had to point to a single writer as the prime mover of that trend, it would be Hemingway.
I think it’s a bit unfair to take the “never” at face value in those first rules. Rather than a tepid, “do this less”, or “do this in moderation” or “think twice about doing this” he says “never” and then says, “by the way, break these rules when you think you should.” It’s a literary device that you might not care for, but the meaning is clear enough, it seems to me.
Dystopian fiction is best read as a dialogue between different visions of the future. Orwell was right about the surveillance state but wrong in his assumption dystopias require shortages to legitimate themselves; Huxley was right that abundance – in the form of consumerism – could be equally dehumanising (it’s one of the themes of Logan’s Run too).
If anything, a dystopia we walk into willingly is more credible than one which is imposed.
Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Nights (written earlier than 1984) has female sexuality repressed (women are basically kept for breeding purposes) and male sexuality sublimated into homosexuality; an interesting twist on the theme.
The fascistic Judges of Judge Dredd are celibate despite the bondage gear (leather and chains) inspired uniforms. Reproduction is tightly controlled too: those born with birth defects are banished to the radioactive wastelands.
@2
That is an interesting point, but the only period in Western history where sex was actually held up as ’shameful,’ the Victorian era, actually saw great advances of democracy, human rights, science, etc. Also population growth continued unabated.
@4
The Puritans were actually quite pro-sex within the context of marriage, in fact if memory serves me correctly they felt a woman had to have an orgasm to conceive and spouses wrote steamy letters.
We have some rather ahistorical tropes out there about what religious conservatives really believe about sex. Even today, whether Islamist or evangelical Christians, very few conservatives actually view sex overall as inherently “dirty and shameful,” they just view it as morally permissible only under the aegis of marriage.
I always took the boot stamping on the face to be a reference to Jack London’s The Iron Heel, the first ‘modern’ dystopia, also written by a socialist known for his essays. It reflected Marx’s belief that capitalism would become more nakedly brutal over time. In the developed world this was largely unnecessary – Huxley was closer to the truth – but elsewhere, e.g. Chile the repression was nakedly violent.
Some later editions of London’s novel show a photo of Salvador Allende being crushed by a boot:
http://www.sffaudio.com/?p=48910
I agree Orwell is over-rated, but maybe one of the reasons his legacy can be more irritating than it should be is the appropriation of his language by the right wingers who make him out to be one of them;as if opposing Communist oppression forbids any form of socialism or progressivism.
That appropriation of Orwell isn’t down to Orwell though; he couldn’t have been more explicit in his statements that everything he wrote was in the cause of democratic socialism.
Animal Farm is specifically about Stalin but about all totalitarianism by extension; 1985 refers to both communism and fascism in the past tense and treats pure totalitarianism as a system in itself. Emmanuel Goldstein’s critique of EngSoc is taken largely from Trotsky.
Sorry, meant 1984.
(1985 is an Anthony Burgess novel about Britain under the control of the unions, which is badly dated, though it did predict the rise of political Islam.)
It seems to me that there is a necessity to dethrone Orwell, if only because he sits on a throne. Like any writer, he can only be judged against the standards and values of his own time, but in that time, he was a giant both honest and courageous, assailed by pygmies and sycophants. And of course, compliments were returned, as they were in due course in the case of Hitchens.
Orwell sits on a throne of his own making, and it consists of course of his literary works. Except that he did not enthrone or crown himself. His readers, we did that.
These debunking and dethroning fashions come and go. ‘The 10 literary works we could do without’ or some such space-filler, will inevitably include, just for a laugh, a play or two by Shakespeare, if not the whole collection.
That distraction over, I wonder what’s on TV tonight.
Oh, come on. That’s a very dismissive thing to say. There are plenty of far more “enthroned” writers I could have chosen if I’d just been pushing over thrones for the sake of it.
@12 Shatterface,
I wonder where Burdekin got her ideas from, the Spartans, perhaps?
I find it very interesting to hear attacks on the status of established classic writers, artists, philosophers, etc., If the critic has anything interesting to say and isn’t just fooling around trying o get attention. I recently read Tolstoy`s infamous anti-Shakespeare essay.
The edition I got was published along with a defense of Shakespeare by Orwell and another long essay by an English writer whose name I forget who disagreed with Tolstoy`s opinion that Shakespeare was a poor dramatist and poet, but agreed that he lacked depth and wisdom, that his characters were superficial and that he had a disturbing contempt for commoners (of which he was one) and an unpleasant deference to monarchs and aristocrats which was naive and primitive even for his time.
Tolstoy had a few good points (the Bard can at times have unnecessarily convoluted plotlines and unclear character motivation) but certainly didn’t convince me to hate Shakespeare.
But it was refreshing simply to read someone discussing him as if he was just a man who wrote plays and poems which we are free to evaluate as seems reasonable to us, rather than a superman who must be admired because cultural authority demands it.
Without such dissenting voices, canonical figures can become fetishes and idols who aren’t engaged with so much as gaped at in passive awe.
OB:
I was very impressed by ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’, but not much by the rest of Orwell’s fiction. For me, the essays and ‘Homage to Catalonia’ are the stand-outs.
For my money, Hitchens was the Orwell of his day, but had of course the advantage of being able to study Orwell and the commentaries on him..
“…There are plenty of far more ‘enthroned’ writers I could have chosen if I’d just been pushing over thrones for the sake of it.”
As I see it, the wake of your own blogging career is littered with up-ended thrones, many if not most of them done before their occupants and would-be ones had even a chance to get properly settled in. 😉
This thread began with a quote from Self (ie Self, Will ???) designed to be provocative for the sake of being so IMHO.
.”The curious thing is that while during the post-war period we’ve had many political leaders, we’ve got by with just a single Supreme Mediocrity – George Orwell.”
O. Puhleez, Mr self-willing Self! But why stop the list there? Surely say, the commentators Arthur Koestler, Louis Fischer, Isaac Deutscher and the novelists John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemigway, Eleanor Dark etc from the period are mediocre enough to make the list! Surely!
The poets Eliot and Pound I will concede and throw to whatever critiqueal lion you like, but not the immortal Dulcie Deamer (1890-1972);. She was in a class of her own IMHO..
Katherine Woo @13:
Hahahahahaha… I’d forgotten how dishonest you are. Thanks for the reminder.
@Shatterface, 14
There’s also his horror at the goose-step. A bully making faces and daring you to laugh, IIRC his description correctly. A ritual from the good old days when soldiers were flogged into unthinking robotic obedience, adopted by modern totalitarians.
And it’s Will Self saying this about Orwell? Ummm, yes, I see.
And of course, it’s always to be expected that each generation will have to “dethrone” all of the icons of the previous generation, in order to clear a space for themselves. It’s amusing to watch, in the same way it’s fun to see how the favorite pastime of writers from the 1920s was to stomp all over the Victorians.
Orwell is not an earth-shattering talent as a novelist. His reputation has been earned by the opportunity to view his essays and criticism across the length of his career.
The red diaper brigade STILL foams at the mouth because Orwell’s ‘Premature Anti-Stalinism’ can never be forgiven by later generations of Stalin worshipers. No one wants to admit that the crypto-communists of Britain and America were just as devoted slaves of totalitarianism as the pro fascist and pro Nazi Right.
Reading this made me go listen to some of Rick Wakeman’s 1984 album on YouTube. There aren’t too many albums you’re likely to run across that have a combination like Wakeman, Chaka Khan, and Tim Rice.
G. K. Pullum, “Fear and Loathing of the English Passive,” Language and Communication 37 (2014): 60–74.
Complaints about “passive” sentences have surprisingly little to do with the passive voice, as linguists define it. Nor is there a coherent folk meaning: sometimes the complaint is an assertion that a sentence is vague about agency, but often enough it isn’t. “Don’t dodge responsibility” would be a maxim more to the point.
I’m just a soul / whose intentions are good / Oh Lord, please don’t let others misunderstand me.
…his last gift to the people he so admired being a list of suspected Soviet agents he sent to MI5.
I had not heard of this before. Were any of the people on that list proven to be Soviet agents? Orwell died on the eve of the McCarthy “I have here in my hand…” era — which was not the first irrational red-scare — so any such list should probably be treated with skepticism unless there’s actual proof.
And in fairness to Orwell’s writing rules, I think most of it was a very understandable reaction to a huge amount of obfuscation and bullshit that he had heard from fascists and con-artists of both the left and the right. They’re not good rules for writing in general, but they’re very good rules for cutting through BS in policy debates, and helping ordinary voters understand what’s true and what’s false.
Also, Orwell was a newsman/commentator/propagandist for Britain during WWII, and it was his job to bash Britain’s fascist enemies in language ordinary English-speaking people on the home front could understand. There’s a book called “The War Commentaries” (a sister-volume to “The War Broadcasts”), and what little I read of it had some pretty good stuff.
(Also, note rule vi above: like Sun Tsu, he understood that one sometimes has to break the rules.)
I’m just a soul / whose intentions are good / Oh Lord, please don’t let others misunderstand me.
That’s not much worse than the original lyric, which I always hated. It always sounded to me like some asshole whining about how he gets so angry because nobody else understands him.
The red diaper brigade STILL foams at the mouth because Orwell’s ‘Premature Anti-Stalinism’ can never be forgiven by later generations of Stalin worshipers. No one wants to admit that the crypto-communists of Britain and America were just as devoted slaves of totalitarianism as the pro fascist and pro Nazi Right.
Oh please — this “red diaper brigade” you speak of is ridiculously overrated, and most of the “crypto-communists” (whatever the fuck that vague phrase even means) were able to continue supporting decent socialist policies without clinging to Stalinism, which never had much hold on British politics anyway. The British and American left had a far more complex history than the McCarthyists ever understood.
I like “Animal Farm” — it’s a great animal allegory about Soviet Communism over the first half of its existence. I like how it presented the emergence of a new ruling class, a new class of exploiters.
But as to “1984”, I like Isaac Asimov’s review of it. He thought that it was overwrought and needlessly contrived. Its hero’s job was to rewrite the history books as appropriate for whatever was the current party line. Thus, he’d alternate between “Oceania was always at war with Eurasia” and “Oceania was always at war with Eastasia” and rewrite the history books appropriately. IA suggested that there was a bit of Orwell himself in it, an ideologue who argued against rival ideologues. But IA suggests that it’s unnecessary, because people can rewrite history without having to rewrite the history books — they ignore anything contrary in those books.
IA conceded that “1984” got something right: shifting alliances and enmities of nations. As he pointed out, GO did not have the common belief among right-wingers that left-wingers are unified and indistinguishable villains. He had had direct experience in the Spanish Civil War that left-wingers would eagerly fight each other even if that meant neglecting fighting their real enemies.